Key:

Babel

Babel is a scholarly journal designed primarily for translators, interpreters and terminologists (T&I), yet of interest also for nonspecialist concerned with current issues and events in the field.

The scope of Babel is intentional and embraces a multitude of disciplines built on the following pillars: T&I theory, practice, pedagogy, technology, history, sociology, and terminology management. Another important segment of this journal includes articles on the development and evolution of the T&I professions: new disciplines, growth, recognition, Codes of Ethics, protection, and prospects.

The creation of Babel was proposed on the initiative of Pierre-François Caillé, founding president of the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT) and approved by the first FIT Congress of 1954 in Paris. Babel continues to be published for FIT and each issue contains a section dedicated to THE LIFE OF FIT.

Articles for Babel are normally published in English or French but we also accept articles in Arabic, Chinese, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish.

Translation traces embrace a wide range of inheritance forms in cultural production practices. Pseudo-originals disclose a kind of literary creation pattern which is a partial or full cross-lingual plagiarism of a text by a predecessor or a contemporary from another language-culture. Well-known quotations in a foreign language are frequently employed by speakers or writers via impromptu translating or memory-based appropriation from an available translation. These translated quotations may well be imitated by text producers to derive a large number of variations in the target culture. Plagiarisms or borrowings are also seen in retranslations of great world classics. As two largely uncharted territories, indirect translation and back translation make translation traces too weak to be located. The inheritance of translation beliefs indicates various genealogies, such as husband-wife genealogy, father-daughter genealogy and so on. Research on the origins of translative memes, their morphology and typology of transmission as well as their mutative reasons may create a new area for Translation Studies.

Given the lack of sensitization to the multi-dimensional concept of quality, and given the versatility of the concept of relevance, the present investigation attempts to examine the premise that Relevance Theory (RT) can function as a standard or a benchmark for maximizing and/or optimizing quality in CI. Whilst the theoretical part relies heavily on Ernst-August Gutt’s seminal work Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context (2000), the practical part draws on some empirical data obtained from trainee-interpreters’ recorded sessions at the Hashemite University (Jordan) in order to provide a relevance-driven account for some semantic, syntactic, and cultural difficulties and problems in CI. The study arrives at the main conclusion that the degree of quality in CI largely depends on the degree of relevance achieved by the interpreter’s TL version, i.e., quality in CI would rise exponentially with the degree of relevance achieved by the interpreter’s TL version. The study also concludes that the pragmatic RT can be considered a reliable instrument, a reliable frame of reference, or a reliable screening system that can ensure both relevance-building and a correspondingly concomitant quality-building in CI, i.e., RT can possibly fine-tune the interpreters’ performance in the booth.

The sources of information that translators may use are extremely varied, ranging from oral consultation with an expert to a search using specialised dictionaries and glossaries. Nowadays, however, one the most relevant documentation activities in the field of Translation involves the use of Internet resources and, closely related to this, the compilation and management of virtual corpora. For this reason, in the present paper we present a systematic methodology for extracting bilingual and bidirectional glossaries (English-Spanish/Spanish-English) based on parallel corpora to translate TV User Manuals. In fact, according to art. 5 of the Council Resolution of 17 December 1998 on operating instructions for technical consumer goods (98/C 411/01) it is essential to control the quality when writing and translating these manuals. In order to illustrate this methodology we focus on corpus design (according to the skopo) and on the compilation protocol (in four steps: searching, downloading, text formatting and saving data) in order to ensure quality. As for the quantity, we check the quantitative representativeness with the ReCor software (cfr. Seghiri 2006: 387). Once the corpus is representative from the qualitative and the quantitative points of view, it can be managed with a concordance program. So, we illustrate how to extract the terms semiautomatically in order to build a bilingual and bidirectional glossary with a parallel concordance named ParaConc. Thus, in the present paper we combine the main resource for researchers (cfr. Bowker 1998; Varantola 2000; Seghiri 2011) within the Translation field: corpora, in order to ensure quality; and the main documentation resource for prospective translators (cfr. Corpas et al. 2001): bilingual glossaries.

Given that both translation ethics and journalistic translation are still two under-explored areas in translation research, this study sets out to discover the ethical model of Iranian translators’ performance in a climate of conflict. To achieve the objective, the researchers monitored and collected the translated journalistic texts concerning the Iranian nuclear negotiations published by a state-run news agency from three days before the Almaty I nuclear talks to three days after the Almaty II negotiations. The monitoring phase resulted in 20 pairs of STs and TTs. The comparative textual analysis indicated patterned and motivated ideological interference in translations which could be accounted for by resorting to teleological models of ethics. Theoretical analysis revealed conceptual overlap between ethics and ideology that could explain the reduction of ethics into ideology in the news agency.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Perez Galdós’s systematic omission of wellerisms in Las Aventuras de Pickwick (1868), the first translation of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers ever made into Spanish. Wellerisms are without a doubt the best-known phraseological units in Dickens. Apart from their comic and subversive function, they play a role of paramount importance in terms of characterization too. Their rendering in another language is thus fundamental. However, only four examples – out of more than thirty– are preserved in Perez Galdós’s text. This loss is scrutinized here. The analysis is divided into two parts. First, some wellerisms from the original novel are compared to those in both Perez Galdós’s translation and Grolier and Lorain’s Aventures de Monsieur Pickwick, for there exists a suspicion that Perez Galdós used this French version as source text for his translation. As will be shown, this suspicion is confirmed. Next, the omission of some examples is analyzed against the backdrop of both the French translation and the original text, so as to provide some feasible explanations for such a loss. As will be demonstrated, Perez Galdós did not realize the stylistic importance of these phraseological units in The Pickwick Papers.

In recent years, several authors have underlined the need to enforce a critical approach to translation studies in order to explore ideologies in both source and target languages and cultures (Hermans 1999; Baker 2006). In this article we shall study BBCMundo’s news web texts and their source English BBCWorld reports from a critical approach. The article is divided into three sections. Firstly, we analyse two series of news texts. We shall discuss the use of headlines in the STs and TTs and proceed to study the strategies used in the main bodies of the reports, notably omissions, additions and permutations. Secondly, we shall concentrate on a case study in an attempt to gain further insight into the interplay of translational and editorial procedures within the Spanish service of the BBC. In a final section, we shall carry out the discussion about the ideological implications of the translational strategies identified in the previous sections.